Fiction
Return to the lost city
During a press interview in Bombay about his latest book, the author-narrator of Friend of My Youth feels ‘a surge…
Rumbles in the jungle
A CIA agent, a naive young filmmaker, a dilettante heir and a lost Mayan temple form the basis of Ned…
A clash of creeds
This is a very modern novel. Terrorist atrocity sits side by side with the familiar and the mundane. Where better…
The violence of poverty
Neel Mukherjee has had a two-handed literary career, working as a reviewer of other people’s novels and writing his own.…
When mother killed the plumber — and Nellie Melba came round to sing
Here’s a pair of little books — one even littler than the other — by Robin Dalton (née Eakin), a…
A Christmas parable from the Spectator’s business editor
I thought you might enjoy a little parable for Christmas, so here goes… The boardroom clock said twelve minutes…
Ian Rankin’s diary: Paris, ignoring Twitter and understanding evil
After ten days away, I spent last Friday at home alone, catching up on washing, shopping for cat food, answering…
Umberto Eco really tries our patience
Colonna, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, is the first to admit he is a loser. A middle-aged literary…
‘I was facing truths I didn’t particularly want to look at’: Michael Moorcock interview
Cult novelist Michael Moorcock on fantasy, his father, and the London he loved and lost
Suite Francaise review: what is this film playing at, when it comes to Jews in attics?
Suite Française is being billed as a second world war romance about ‘forbidden love’ and, in this regard, it is…
Sebastian Faulks’s diary: My task for 2015 – get a job
Just back from Sri Lanka, a place I first went to in 1981. It was then a dreamy island. I…
Life doesn’t care if your misery has a plot – but readers do
Sometimes writers have to get a memoir out of their system before they can start on their great novel. Will…
Lurid & Cute is too true to its title
One of the duties of a reviewer is to alert potential readers to the flavour and content of a book,…
A ghost story without the scary bits
Two men walk into an ice cream parlour in Austin, Texas, order the three teenage girls working there to undress,…
Why you might not want corridors in your historical novel
I read C.J. Sansom’s novel Dissolution on the train recently with pleasure. For an historical novel narrated in the 1530s,…
L.P. Hartley’s guide to coping with a heatwave
Those of us who have been struggling to endure the recent heat should turn to L.P. Hartley’s classic coming-of-age novel The…
Jacqueline Wilson: 'The first book that made me cry'
Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows, first published in 1955, focuses on the roaming children — the ‘sparrows’ — of a shabby street in bomb-torn London. When ten-year-old Lovejoy Mason finds a packet of cornflower seeds and decides to create an ‘Italian’ garden hidden in a rubble-strewn churchyard, the consequences are life-changing for all who become involved. Below is the foreword to a recent reissue of the novel (Virago Modern Classics, £7.99, Spectator Bookshop, £7.49).
From frankness to obsession - the novels of Francis King
Paul Binding reassesses the novels of Francis King, who died last year
William S. Burroughs was a writer – not a painter, prophet, philosopher
William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all…
When No Man's Land is home
Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the…
By the book: The NSA is behaving like a villain in a 1950s novel
The continuing drip-feed of stories about governments and friendly-seeming internet giants sifting through our data has left some citizens feeling…
Breakdowns, suicide attempts — and four great novels
Among the clever young Australians who came over here in the 1960s to find themselves and make their mark, a…
The many attempts to assassinate Trotsky
Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in…
Margaret Drabble tries to lose the plot
Halfway through her new novel, Margaret Drabble tells us of Anna, the pure gold baby of the title, ‘There was…
Ann Patchett's new book will win you over, in spite of yourself
Ann Patchett’s novels revel in the tightly constructed ecosystems imagined for their characters: an opera singer besieged among diplomats in…
